Calgary Police Service Staff Sgt. Travis Baker wears one of the service's new Axon body cameras on Tuesday July 3, 2018. Gavin Young/PostmediaGavin Young / Postmedia

Calgary’s police chief says he is open to the service releasing body camera footage from serious, high-risk incidents.

While Chief Mark Neufeld said while body camera footage from serious incidents, such as Wednesday’s officer-involved shooting that left a woman dead, gets transferred to the Alberta Serious Incident Response Team, there are other instances in which Calgary police could release the footage.

“In cases where we were the investigating agency, I would be open to us to do it,” he told a Postmedia Calgary editorial board meeting, adding forces in the United States that quickly release footage from incidents may be compelled to do so because of public distrust.

“I think a lot of times where I’ve seen it in the U.S., it’s been around in cities where there has been real issues around public trust and confidence.

“I don’t think we have the same pressures, necessarily, that they would have in some of those communities, like Ferguson (Mo.) or Chicago or New Orleans.”

With the Calgary police having finished its rollout of the Axon body cameras for the service’s approximately 1,100 members, Neufeld said the professional standards team is looking to hire more bodies to process some of the footage.

“They’re actually looking at adding to their cadre of investigators because, now, virtually all the complaints that they get involve one or more body-worn video,” said Neufeld, adding he feels the body camera program is valuable.

“I think it’s good from the perspective of public confidence … to be as transparent as we can.”

Staff Sgt. Travis Baker said the body cameras are not monitored in real time, but officers are able to view a live feed from their smartphones or computers.

“Once the video is recorded, we can watch it directly off of the camera,” Baker said. “Because it’s a cloud-based solution, once the camera is docked with the docking station it’ll be uploaded to the cloud.”

Officers will be able to review footage and add notes and comments, but Baker said “there’s no way that an officer can delete the video or change the video” before being uploaded to the service’s body-worn camera unit.

Police policy requires officers to have the cameras powered while on duty, and members will face severe penalties if cameras are turned off.

Baker said the cameras have more than enough data storage and battery life to last a 12-hour shift.

Calgary isn’t the first law enforcement group in Alberta to deploy body cameras.

Peace officers in Chestermere have been using them since 2014 with all members now equipping the cameras daily, peace officer Sgt. Trever Bowman said.

The program has been a success in Bowman’s eyes, noting that officers are spending less time in court and their group has noticed a drop in administrative prices. Not only that, but Bowman said they’ve been an excellent tool for de-escalation, adding that use-of-force incidents have dropped.

“They also lead to early case resolution — if the accused knows their actions and comments are being caught on a body-worn camera, our court time is drastically reduced,” he said. “If a picture’s worth 1,000 words, a high-definition video of an incident is priceless.”

Bowman said their footage is stored on hard drives in a secure location for up to five years.

Meanwhile, the head of the continent’s top supplier of body cameras, Axon, announced Wednesday that facial recognition will not be used in its devices, the Washington Post reported.

Axon convened an independent board last year assessing the possibility and ethical costs of facial recognition, with the board finding “face recognition technology is not currently reliable enough to ethically justify its use.”

The primary concerns cited was bias and inaccuracy and, according to the board report, the system demonstrated implicit biases making them less accurate for people of colour, women and children.

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